Friday, June 09, 2017

Life After Comey

“Life goes on without’ya…” – Just a Gigolo

Answers to the larger Watergate questions – What did the President
know, and when did he know it? – must await the final report of Special Prosecutor Robert Muller. In the meantime, the dreaded mainstream media
is always able, if willing, to provide convincing answers to smaller but
significant questions, not the least of which concerns the traditional
relationship between the Director of the FBI, who may be dismissed for cause,
and the President – any President – of the United States.

The investigatory functions of the FBI, everyone will agree,
are independent of the president in this sense:
while the president has the constitutional power and authority to
dismiss the FBI Director, this option by no means guarantees that a specific
investigation involving the president will be dropped. Indeed, during his
recently concluded congressional interrogation former FBI Director James Comey
asserted publicly, for the first time under oath, that neither President Donald Trump nor any
member of his administration asked him to put the brakes on pending FBI
investigations; he also asserted that the president was not, during his term in
office, the target of any FBI investigation, an assertion the president had
asked Comey to make public before, when the contrary notion was being peddled
numerous time in numerous publications.

The FBI is part of the executive arm of government and, as
such, its director, who serves at the pleasure of the president, is subject to
dismissal for or without cause; which is to say, the director may be dismissed
at the will and whimsy of the president. Everyone will agree that such authority
should, on most occasions, bow to prudence.

As a practical matter, the dismissal powers of any president
are politically contingent. Often in the past, powerful directors – J. Edgar
Hoover, the guy in the red dress, leaps to mind – have maintained incriminating
dossiers on both presidents and powerful civic leaders. Those dossiers have
sometimes served as a check on the dismissal powers of Presidents John Kennedy,
Lyndon Johnson, and others. Hoover was said to have possessed dirt on the
Reverend Martin Luther King as well. Like Comey, Hoover was not above leaking
such information to friendly media sources. The dismissal powers of the
president and damaging dossiers are two sharp edges to a political sword. On
the one hand, FBI Directors fear dismissal; on the other hand, presidents fear
the black tar-brush of FBI Directors. This tension serves to preserve the
relative independence of both presidents and FBI Directors.

During his interrogation, Comey identified himself as a
leaker. He had kept notes of a private conversation between himself and
President Trump; and following a broad hint from Trump that there might exist a
secretly recorded tape of their private discussion, Comey released his own
record of the conversation to a friend who dangled it before a news
publication; the questioning of Comey disclosed a timeline problem with his
version of events.

In any case, Comey, wisely or not, chose to follow a path
set by Hoover, the first Director of the FBI. Comey was unable to answer
convincingly questions put to him by Democrat U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein and moderate Republican U.S. Senator Susan Collins, not a Trump aficionado: why
did Comey fail to advise the President that he could not in good conscience
satisfy Trump’s whimsy and close down a pending
investigation?

Comey said he was “stunned” by the President’s apparent
suggestion. Comey was not pressed on the point why, when he recovered from this
mild shock, he did not do his duty by the president and advise him of the inappropriateness
of his apparent attempt to influence a Director of the FBI to shut down a
pending investigation. How long, precisely, did Comey remain stunned? Did the
blow he imagined receiving permanently short-circuit his moral obligations?
Perhaps he was too busy assembling his dossier.

The interrogatory that elicited the most telling information
from Comey, frightened out of his wits by an inept president, was put to him by Senator Marco Rubio, who observed archly that of all the dubious data leaked to
the media, most of it damaging to Trump, the most important datum – namely,
that Comey had advised the President numerous times that he was not the subject
of any FBI investigation – remained a closely held secret that Comey was not
willing to share with the journalistic resistance at the New York Times.

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For
35 years a political columnist published in a variety of Connecticut newspapers,
Don Pesci has written for the Middletown Press, the Torrington Register
Citizen, The Waterbury Republican American, the Norwich Bulletin, the Day of
New London, the Journal Inquirer of Manchester, the Providence Journal, and
others; he is also the proprietor of a popular blog, Connecticut Commentary:
Red Notes from a Blue State, one of the older Connecticut blogs. Most of the
columns are printed here, roughly 2,500 entrees.